Chapter 14
Pippa
Imake it to the office before I start shaking.
Which is something.
Not enough, but something.
The door is half-closed behind me. Not shut, because shutting it would make it look like I need privacy, and needing privacy is dangerously close to needing something.
But not open either, because I cannot stand in the crew room for one more second with everyone looking to me for shape and edges and permission to keep functioning.
I have done the debrief.
I have checked the crew.
I have told them to eat, get warm, rest if they can.
I have said the things that needed saying.
The work was good.
The outcome was not what we wanted.
Do not sit there rewriting the whole incident as if a different thought at the wrong second changes what happened.
All true.
All necessary.
All completely useless against the sound of Arthur’s wife screaming his name into the rain.
I put my mug down on the desk, untouched, and brace both hands beside it.
The office is too bright.
The strip light hums. The computer monitor has gone to sleep. There is a stack of forms by the keyboard, a half-dead plant on the windowsill and a damp patch on the carpet near the door where someone’s boots have brought the night inside.
Normal things.
Normal, ugly, practical things.
I focus on them because they are safer than the other images my mind keeps trying to show me.
The orange flare of the roof.
Mud under my boots.
Arthur’s grey hair plastered to his forehead.
One slipper missing.
His wife’s face when she understood.
My breath comes in too shallow, so I force it down. In through my nose. Hold. Out through my mouth. Not because I am calm. Because calm is sometimes just a set of instructions you give your body until it remembers how to obey.
I am fine.
I am fine because I have to be.
The crew need me steady. They need me able to look them in the eye and tell them the truth without cracking. They need to know that if the alarm goes again in five minutes, I will be ready. They need to believe I can hold the next thing, whatever it is.
And I can.
I can.
I just need thirty seconds where nobody asks me to prove it.
My hands tighten on the edge of the desk.
The first tear falls before I can stop it.
One.
Ridiculous.
Furious.
I wipe it away immediately, angry with myself for letting it happen at all.
“Not now,” I whisper.
My voice sounds strange in the small room.
Not now.
Not here.
Not while we are still on duty.
Not while my crew are twenty feet away, pretending toast is a personality trait because that is better than sitting in silence with a dead man between us.
I press the heel of my hand against my sternum, as if I can hold everything in by force.
It almost works.
Then there is a knock at the door.
Light.
Careful.
I close my eyes.
“Pippa?”
AJ.
Not loud. Not pushing. Just my name through the gap in the door.
Of all the people who could find me like this, it would have to be him. The man I should keep at arm’s length. The man I have been keeping at arm’s length. The man who keeps noticing the spaces I have spent years teaching people not to look at too closely.
I drag in one breath.
Then another.
“Come in,” I say, and my voice almost sounds like mine.
The door opens a few inches first, as if he is giving me time to change my mind. Then he steps inside.
He stops just inside the door and leaves it partly open behind him.
“I brought you absolutely nothing,” he says.
I look at him.
He gestures towards the mug on my desk. “You already had tea and refused to use it.”
Something almost laughs in me.
It does not quite make it out.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I say.
“I’ve had mixed success with doing what I’m supposed to.”
My mouth wants to soften.
I do not let it.
Not fully.
“You should be with the others.”
“So should you.”
“I’m doing notes.”
His gaze drops briefly to the blank monitor, then back to me.
“No,” he says. “You’re standing over a keyboard thinking about doing notes.”
I should snap at him.
I should remind him where he is and what I am and where the lines are.
Instead, I turn back to the desk because my face feels too exposed.
“You’ve become dangerously observant.”
“I had a good teacher.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make this charming.”
The words come out quieter than I intend.
He goes still.
Not offended.
Listening.
“I’m not trying to make it charming,” he says.
“No?”
“No.” A pause. “Possibly warm. But not charming.”
This time, I do laugh.
Barely.
A cracked little sound that hurts on the way out.
It is gone almost immediately, and the space it leaves behind is worse.
My fingers press into the desk.
“I’m fine.”
He does not answer immediately.
That is his first sensible move.
Eventually he says, “Okay.”
I look at him over my shoulder.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you can get through the next hour.”
That reaches a place in me I’m not ready to name.
I face the desk again.
The honesty of it is unbearable.
I am used to people accepting fine because they need it to be true. I am used to giving them the version of me that lets them move on. It works. It has worked for years.
AJ does not argue with the lie.
He simply stands there and lets us both know it is one.
“I can’t do this in front of them,” I say.
“I know.”
“I mean it. I can’t. They need me steady.”
“They had that.”
“They still do.”
“Yes,” he says. “But maybe not every second.”
I shake my head.
The movement is too small to be convincing.
“You don’t understand.”
“No,” he says. “Not properly.”
That is better than if he had said he did.
Worse too, somehow.
Outside the office, someone says something about toast. Kev answers, rough but trying. There is the faint scrape of a chair, the clink of mugs, the station putting itself back into small pieces of ordinary.
In here, my hands are shaking.
I curl them against the desk edge.
AJ sees.
Of course he sees.
He sets his own mug down on the filing cabinet beside him.
Slowly.
Clearly.
As if sudden movement might spook me.
As if I am an injured animal.
“Pippa,” he says.
“Don’t.”
It comes out sharper than I mean.
His face does not change.
“All right.”
“I don’t need—”
“I'm not going to.”
“You don’t.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. But I know you don’t need me to tell you it’s okay, because it isn’t. I know you don’t need me to say you did everything you could, even though you did. And I know you definitely don’t need me standing here looking tragic and useless.”
For a moment, neither of us moves.
Then I push away from the desk, because standing braced against it has started to feel like surrender. I mean to straighten. To turn. To say something brisk and sensible and final.
Instead, my hand comes up to my mouth.
Not dramatic.
Not sobbing.
Just a desperate attempt to keep everything inside.
“I hate this bit,” I say.
The words are barely there.
AJ hears them anyway.
“What bit?”
“When it’s over.”
My throat burns.
“When everyone looks at me as if I can make it make sense.”
He is quiet for a second.
Then he says, “You gave them somewhere to put it.”
I close my eyes.
That is too close.
Too accurate.
Too kind.
“That’s not the same thing as sense.”
“No.”
His voice is low.
Not soft in the weak way.
Steady.
I have spent the last hour being steady for everyone else, and now he is standing in my office being steady back, and I do not know what to do with it.
“I had him,” I say.
The words come out before I can stop them.
AJ says nothing and I am glad he’s not.
If he speaks now, I might break completely.
“I had him,” I repeat, because apparently once a wound opens, it wants air. “We got him out. We got him out quickly once we found him. The work was good. I know the work was good.”
“It was.”
“I know that.”
“Yes.”
“But his wife—”
My voice stops.
There is no professional word for that sound.
There is no box on the incident report for the way a woman screams when the person she has built a life around is suddenly a body in the rain.
My eyes sting.
I blink hard.
It does nothing useful.
“I can still hear her,” I say.
AJ takes one step closer.
Slow enough that I can stop him.
I do not.
“I’m here,” he says.
It is not much.
It is everything I cannot ask for.
For one second, we both stand very still.
Then my face crumples.
Not fully.
Not loudly.
But enough that I feel it happen. Enough that the last careful seam gives way.
AJ closes the distance between us, and when he lifts his arms, he still waits.
One breath.
One chance for me to refuse.
I do not take it.
I step into him instead.
Hard.
Like I am angry about needing somewhere to go.
His arms come around me.
Not tight enough to trap.
Tight enough to hold.
And that is what does it.
Not the death. Not the rain. Not the debrief. Not Arthur’s wife’s voice. Not the brutal, unfair, ordinary fact that sometimes we do everything right and people still die.
It is the holding.
The fact that I do not have to stand upright under my own power for one bloody minute.
I press my forehead into his shoulder and breathe him in.
Rain.
Clean cotton.
Tea.
Smoke, faintly, still clinging somewhere neither of us has managed to wash away.
He does not speak.
He does not stroke my hair like I am fragile. He does not murmur nonsense. He does not make himself larger or softer or cleverer than the moment needs.
He just holds me.
As if I am allowed to be heavy.
As if I can stop being useful and still be safe.
My hands close in the fabric at his sides.
I cry quietly because there is no other kind I can allow here. Even that feels enormous. A few hard, silent breaks of breath against his shoulder. A hot, humiliating spill of tears I cannot stop quickly enough.
He takes it.
All of it.
Steady.
Warm.
There.
For the first time all night, I am not the person everyone is looking to.
I am just a woman in an office, held by a man who should not matter this much.